The Risen

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Risen Geographies and Dwelling Places

Beau Lotto, of LottoLab Studio, gave a TedTalk that used optical illusions to demonstrate how we perceive the world. He investigates "how the human mind makes sense from the senseless." Underlying the fact that we can never truly see what's "out there" but only what's in our head, shaped by how our brain has learned to interpret various signals, are these ideas Beau offers:

"No one is an outside observer of nature ...each of us is defined by our ecology ... ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical."

These ideas come startlingly close in some ways to how one may begin to imagine how life is experienced as Risen; especially poignant for me is his demonstration as to how sights can be converted to sounds, using the example of a 6 year old's painting, converted to music. On earth, we have the physical body, acting as a filter for the incoming information from the Universe around us; the ego-mind, generally uncontrolled by Authentic Self and given free reign, makes judgmental choices for our emotional and psychological behavior, according to its own hidden agenda. Without the terrestrial body, which (usually) ends the ego-mind's dominance, our world is revealed to us on a very different level of perceived truth, indeed, many different levels.

Tim shares in The Risen:

"... light is also sound and therefore music is light. Each and every single unit of life is a light-filled tone and tone-filled light. Every thing vibrates and all movement produces light and sound. All universes are an ongoing symphony of infinite drama. Your life on earth and beyond it is a melody. This is less apparent on the earth due to its great density and lower vibration, which dulls and deadens the spirit, greatly lessening the connection every thing has with everything. It becomes more obvious on those planes beyond the Earth as we become more refined and of greater vibration.”

"Ecology" is highly resonant to the concept of "geography" which the Risen directed me to use in our book. It means not only our surroundings, but because we are inextricably immersed in it, it also means our worlds: the climate, the weather, the air, the light, the sounds, its history(ies), its feelings. One of my brothers is a wildlife technologiest (a fancy name for a park ranger) and he once explained to me about the ecology — or world – of a tree. We can see the tree, rising out of the ground, spreading its branches and leaves up and into the world around it, touching other trees, and their worlds, merging into a collective of worlds within worlds. Each tree is breathing, taking in elements through its roots and leaves, and then releasing others back into the air. Each tree gives off heat in the form of energy and reflective light. Every cell is alive with non-stop activity. Every tree gives harbor to many other life forms.

Beneath each tree, if one observes with patience, are other plants -- grasses and baby trees, fungi, each with its own ecology exactly like the Mother Tree above them, and all immersed in Mother's world, and merging into one another's. These worlds interpenetrate, interact, teach, learn, implant, extract, love. "Worlds within worlds", as the oft-repeated phrase in our book goes.

In the recent posting "Return to Summerland" I attempt to share what it's like being in a Risen geography while not yet Risen -- not easy! Here are some interesting excerpts from the book that Tim shares in his attempts to describe his own ecological experience:

The word ‘live’ is not quite correct in connection with the way dwelling spaces exist here—actually, ‘dwell’ works much better. And the word ‘time’ isn’t exactly right either. I don’t dwell there all the time—hardly ever, actually, for there is far too much beyond it. Infinooty! There are never-ending environments for me to explore or manifest and occupy for as long as I want.

I see you are wondering what lies beyond this tiny apartment where Bigfoot and I sometimes rest. Nothing and yet everything lies beyond it. When I go for walks through the old neighborhood, it’s the same, yet so much more. Each and every thing is alive, suffused by glowing, pulsating, prismatic lights, filled with life and energy as the sun-filled trees in the parks, effervescent as the fountains which give forth music, their waters welling up and cascading down pieces of sculpture that are never the same. Birds, animals, butterflies, and flowers of exquisite and dramatic beauty populate this geography. It is all a manifestation of my mind, yet infinitely more.

We are of the same Mind, and so wherever or whenever we are, Mind Is. There is no place or time Mind can’t be. If we move ‘outward,’ that movement can continue without ceasing, manifesting environments within which to dwell. The very movement of Mind is manifestation. If we move in a way that we desire to be ‘inward,’ the result is the same. If I desire to dwell in light or darkness, or seasons and weather, there are no limitations imposed upon my desires except those I place upon them. (1)

Of course I’m speaking of the positive, spiritually inspired powers of the individual use of Mind. To the extent that one’s thoughts, dreams and fantasies are able to manifest in ways that are beautiful and meaningful evidences the degree of spiritual evolution, of the self-love and self-esteem that enable and support the love and esteem of other individuals, and the level of understanding that Mind is a shared experience as well as an individual one. There are those on the earth, who, for whatever reasons unique to their experience, understanding, and individual evolution, are unable to manifest much more than a Risen tar-paper shack—if even that. While they might be able to fantasize about a sumptuous Hollywood mansion, more than likely the nature of that image is of the earth-bound, ego-mind’s desires and so could not in any real way be imaginally expressed in the higher astral realms.

For example, the nature of greed appears to manifest in the earthly realm as an energy that is able to acquire, accumulate, and manifest imagined wealth in all its forms of ego-mind desire. In the Risen Worlds, however, the nature of greed, having been individualized and nurtured through belief and habit on the earth, but now accepted into the infinite capacity of Authentic Self, is no longer a toy in the hands of the limited and now dissolved ego-mind. Instead, through the greater and unlimited power of the Higher Mind, the emptiness of greed is like dry air blowing over a parched landscape. And that is what most likely will manifest—landscapes of vast, empty expanses of dead and dying vegetation, unable to grow or revive from lack of the energy of a loving, serene spirit that is connected to Original Source, whence outpours all sustenance.

I see the greatest gift we have been given by Original Creator Source as the ability to change our mind. Many, many souls, upon coming to a stagnated state of mind, become trapped by their ignorance of their true nature, which is that the Mind of the Highest Self is also their own mind and is shared by all individualized minds. The illusion of ignorance further manifests as an illusion of fear, and thus seems to result in a trap or as ‘hell.’ Many of our spirit rescues here involve the answering of mental and emotional cries for help from souls imprisoned in the illusion of their fears. Others never seem to feel the need to ask for help, and some even knowingly resist it.

It’s greatly comforting and invigorating to know that Nature—that is, flowers, trees, gardens and forests, animals, birds, and people, are awaiting us when we leave this terrestrial experience and transition to the next.

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(1) Tim’s experiences sound very similar to the currently developing theory of biocentrism, which posits that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos — life creates the universe rather than the other way around.

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.-- (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 26)

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"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

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"The instrument of thought, which has produced this world that does not work properly, is no longer valid. So perhaps this instrument of thought is worn out. Is there another instrument we can use?" -- Krishnamurti

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"...Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
-- Alfred North Whitehead - English mathematician & philosopher (1861-1947)___________________________________

". . . keeping the Risen concept of weaving in mind, perhaps at this point it can be sensed that what we have before us, from which we are inseparable and as reflected in this book, is a Supreme Tapestry. There appears to be a Very Grand Design which we all follow, either in awareness
or not, co-creatively or not -- recalling that creative means fun. As we weave we are free to make it up as we go along in any way we please, simultaneously staying within the Grand Design as imagined by Higher Imaginals, of whom we an inseparable part. The Grand Design is a work of perfections intermingled with imperfections, solutions with mistakes, and stillness within movement. The Higher Imaginals are many things, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that they are very advanced and evolved individuals, or Higher Selves."
(from The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief & Survival Beyond Death; Chapter 13, Mundus Imaginalis, p. 165).